Fans of the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire basemap (or DARE basemap) may have noticed that it disappeared from Peripleo a few months ago!
Peripleo is the superb mapping site where you can look up the locations of places in the ancient world. It is is absolutely indispensable in those moments when you just can’t remember which modern town occupies the site of ancient Mesembria. Which happens to me a lot. Also Sirmium.
At present when you look at the available layers in Peripleo, The satellite layer (“Aerial”), Openstreetmap (“Modern Places”) and the empty basemap are there, but no DARE (“Ancient Places”).
Even more worrisome, the old URL for visiting the DARE map where it was hosted at the University of Lund, Sweden, http://dare.ht.lu.se/, was not responding.
However, DARE is now back! The map has been moved to a new location at the the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Gothenburg, https://dh.gu.se/dare/.
Many thanks to its creator and maintainer, Johan Åhlfeldt.
Better yet, he has also given out the URL for the tile server itself, so if you run QGIS you can now add DARE as a basemap layer in the QuickTileServices plugin.
Here’s how:
Go Web>QuickMapServices>Settings
Go to the Add/Edit/Remove tab.
Click the ‘+’ button next to My groups, and create a DARE group.
Click OK and then click the ‘+’ button next to My Services. First add the name of the service and choose TMS for Type…
then go to the TMS tab and fill in those parameters:
- URL: https://dh.gu.se/tiles/imperium/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
- Z min: 4
- Z max: 11
- Y origin top: Yes!
- CRS ID: 3857 (pseudo-mercator)
Click OK and then Save, and your service is set up.
It should now appear on the Web>QuickMapServices menu.
Also, since tile-based services operate at zoom levels that correspond to a very strange set of scales (like 1:1,155,583), remember that you can always snap to the nearest tile scale by going Web>QuickMapServices>Set proper scale.
Happy ancient world mapping!
The Wandering Cartographer 